The mood in here

The electoral process

I disagree with the electoral process why can't we give one vote to every state now and then decide what the nation wants instead of a few number of states, the country was red only a handful was blue ! In order to make this process fair for every voter this would be the right thing to do because all states votes would count ! Simple math! It's about time this country gets real!

I think you must think you're talking to Bill O'Reilly, not Tim O'Reilly the technical publisher, but I'll take a stab at it anyway.

The electoral college is an attempt to balance the rights of states against the rights of individual citizens. While it is true that there are many more red states than blue states, it is also true that there are many more people in the blue states. And not only that, those blue states pay the majority of the taxes, and the people in the red states receive a disproportionate share of the benefits.

It's certainly possible that we could move to a proportional allocation of electoral college votes, so that each state is allocated by population. If that were the case, President Obama would still have won, since he had more of the popular vote.

In your solution, thinly populated states would have the same vote as the heavily populated ones. That, is the 567,000 people in Wyoming, for example, would have the same weight as the 37 million people in California, or the 26 million in New York. Clearly that would not reflect the will of the people!

I think you must think you're talking to Bill O'Reilly, not Tim O'Reilly the technical publisher, but I'll take a stab at it anyway.

The electoral college is an attempt to balance the rights of states against the rights of individual citizens. While it is true that there are many more red states than blue states, it is also true that there are many more people in the blue states. And not only that, those blue states pay the majority of the taxes, and the people in the red states receive a disproportionate share of the benefits.

It's certainly possible that we could move to a proportional allocation of electoral college votes, so that each state is allocated by population. If that were the case, President Obama would still have won, since he had more of the popular vote.

In your solution, thinly populated states would have the same vote as the heavily populated ones. That, is the 567,000 people in Wyoming, for example, would have the same weight as the 37 million people in California, or the 26 million in New York. Clearly that would not reflect the will of the people!

Should we also then change the way we handle voting for and assigning our House of Representatives? They are based on population (more populous states have more Reps, hence more of a say), vs senators (2 per state).